A story about male friendship, truth and loss.

The television was playing, one of those talent shows where the judges make more noise than the contestants. Fin put his hand over the phone and called out for Mia to turn it down but she closed the door instead. He was thinking many things at once. He stared at the light coming under the lounge room door. The man on the other end of the telephone was sobbing. There was nothing to say. It was like listening to a storm and if you didn’t like storms there was nothing to do until it died down. And lo, it came to pass, with the man apologising for asking such a big favour.

“Oh, not at all. I’m glad to do it,” said Fin. “I’ll call you afterward.”

Fin was the only one of the old gang from school to call the old man Mr Wilson. Everybody else had been calling him Frank for years, even his own children. Good old Frank. He’d been to Vietnam and come back sane. Tough. Even hard. He was able to talk about the men he’d killed in a way that wasn’t glory-making or boastful, nor corroded with self-loathing. Frank Wilson was one of those men willing to face up to the harshest realities and not be consumed by them. But now he sounded frail.

“If I was a man,” he said, “I’d go down there myself. I just don’t want to see him until they’ve fixed him up, I just wouldn’t know what to do,” and that’s when he began to cry again. Once again Fin didn’t say anything comforting. He just let the old man go to water until there was a lull and then he said, as if it was any other day, as if there was all manner of things to look forward to, he said, “I’m actually away over the weekend. So I’d like to come by in the morning and say hello to Mrs Wilson and everybody. I’ll bring some breakfast. Is that okay?”

“Oh, that’d be good,” and the old man blew his nose and cleared his throat and whispered something to someone in the background.

“Well, I better get going,” said Fin. “They probably need me to go down there straight away.”

He put down the telephone and worried at how detached he was feeling. He needed to change his clothes and that wasn’t something that required sadness. It was a good thing to do, pulling on a clean shirt, underwear, socks, a freshening of the mood. He must have drifted off into vagueness because Mia was standing in front of him and he was holding a shoe in one hand.

“Are we still driving down tonight?” she said.

“I can’t. You should go down and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“What’s going on?”

He hesitated saying it was Rory. She’d make too big a fuss and he didn’t trust any of it to be sincere, certainly not helpful. Really he just wanted to keep this as much to himself as possible, for as long as he could.

“A friend of mine from school has died.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” she said, rubbing his arm and making a worried face. Her phone went off. It was in the waistband of her gym pants. Leggings. Whatever the hell they were.

“Yay, we were just saying … Give me ten minutes,” she said into the phone, apologising to Fin with a faux grumpy face and then a sad face and a series of gestures. He took the opportunity, quickly kissing her on the cheek, grabbing a sports coat and taking the elevator to the car park. He met a neighbour arriving home.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

Long moments filled with small talk had to pass before he was finally sitting in the car and pulling the door closed. He sighed loudly and sat very still. He wasn’t breathing, and then he was breathing hard, and a feeling of panic rose behind his eyes. He turned on the radio to soften the cold loneliness and Bruno Mars burst to life with Marry You and immediately Rory’s voice came to mind, scornful and hilarious. Bruno Mars was a favourite of Mia’s and it was here that Fin reflected on the fact that she didn’t know that Rory could do a vicious parody of Bruno’s teen tones because Rory wasn’t the kind of fellow who needed to hurt people for the sake of being superior. Ordinarily Fin would have switched stations but the contrived lyrics of the song brought his friend to life and this feeling lingered as he pulled out into the street and headed downtown. By the time he walked into the morgue, he may well have been striding on to a podium to receive an award or give a talk to some adoring school children. The man at the desk recognised his face and started to launch into football talk about the next season not being far away and how was the knee holding up, but Fin did a good job of keeping to business. A police sergeant soon appeared and together they went in through the swing doors and down a hall dark enough to be theatrical. They came to a well-lit room of many drawers and three steel tables. Lying upon one of these tables was his friend under a sheet. When the sheet was lowered Fin was astonished to find no gash or bruising or any suggestion that Rory had met with violence. He wasn’t peaceful-looking in a sleeping kind of way, more caught in a moment of drunken laxness.

“I don’t understand it.”

“All the airbags were activated,” said the police sergeant, “but sometimes, even if there are no airbags, there isn’t a mark on them. All the damage is inside.”

And that was when he finally cried.

*

He came awake with the immediacy and fullness of a gong being sounded. There was inside him, too, a deep hum, the after-burn of dreams he could not recall. There was no lag of knowing. He’d once woken in a hospital with the feeling that his stomach had been torn open and not understood why this was so, but here, in his bed, he understood why he ached between his ribs. He moaned loudly and got out of bed and started dressing for a long run through the botanical gardens that yawned handsomely along the river. The gates were locked at night but he sometimes climbed the fence and went running through the ancient trees and down to the lake where the birds were at their secret business among the reeds.

Crossing the road from the apartment block, he changed his mind and ran as hard as he could to South Melbourne, to a bakery that wasn’t as yet open to customers but he knew they’d all make a fuss and be happy to see him. It was rare that he made use of his celebrity but he was of a mind that Rory’s family would also be awake. It was just a little after 2am. He felt himself going mad and wanted to be with his own kind.

The boys at the bakery made him coffee and said to try one of the first scrolls out of the oven and they stood around with their camera-phones and their questions and their memories of different games and Fin amiably played the part until someone shouted, “Back to work,” and so he finished his coffee, watching them busy at the ovens. Two of the younger boys looked up and waved when he picked up the paper bags and walked out.

Back at the apartment, he packed his bag, brushed down his suit for the wedding and drove west to Altona. A lone bird was singing and listening for a mate to answer back. The Wilson house was dark and quiet. Mr Wilson came to the door in his dressing gown and with a frightened look on his face. They’d all taken sleeping pills he said. And then he said, “I suppose it was the boy,” meaning the body in the morgue being Rory.

“Yes, it was.” Rory Wilson was dead.

Mr Wilson nodded in a workmanlike way, as if he’d been reminded of a chore.

“There wasn’t a mark on him.”

And again Mr Wilson made a mental note. “His mother needs to know. She’ll want to see him.” They went into the kitchen and Mr Wilson made a cup of tea and they picked at one of the croissants. Somewhere down the street an old car started noisily, almost asthmatically: God telling a joke that couldn’t be resisted. They both guffawed and Rory was gone enough in that instant for Mr Wilson to shake his head and say, “That bloody thing,” and he clung to this ordinary amusement and said too quickly, “So, what are you up to for the weekend?”

“I’m going to a wedding.”

They could have easily fallen into the hole again but the wedding was a joke too.

“That was never going to catch him.”

“Not the marrying kind.”

“No matter what.”

Rory had talked to Fin about some of the men he’d known, the kind of people they were and the problems they brought. He wondered if Rory had had those sorts of conversations with his father. He realised too there had always been things he couldn’t have talked about with anyone else but his one real friend.

Who would he talk to now? Who would hold him and look him in the eye as a means of reassurance? When it meant something?

*

It was still dark when he left Mr Wilson. Someone upstairs had started moaning and Mr Wilson said he’d better get back to it. Fin chewed gum as he drove. It was how he talked in his quiet agitation: thinking the thoughts and chewing the gum. Two and a half hours west, with the radio quiet and only the white noise of the neglected road and then the brittle contrast of an even rougher road, he was in the old country. A dead friend and a wedding to think about, and all those waspy people from boarding school. He thought about them and dreaded the faux genteel carry-on and the customary jokiness as a warning against recalcitrance. They’d have joked about Mia turning up last night without him. They’d have given her a jolly going-over and now it would be his turn and what the hell was wrong with him if he couldn’t take a joke, “Come on, Tiger!” His mother had seen them for what they were. “If only the people were as pretty as the country.” The country was green and rumpled and smelled rudely of life and the heavy cattle and sheep that stood upon it. There were ragged sheets of fog suspended over the road. Low, neat stone walls crossed the paddocks for as far as the eye could see. Indeed, here were a people whose forebears had dreamt of England and some of them still dressed as such. They weren’t bad people. They were a stranded people and in a castaway fashion there were many unspoken rules about what life was about, and how it should be lived, and the kind of people who should be living it. Civilisation has its local tics and these people wore their friendliness as if waving flags. And nothing made them feel friendlier than the validation of their own lives with another country wedding.

He pulled the car over. The road sat above a piece of country that dropped away into a shallow bowl, pink-misted, still of birds and wet with the night. He could see across to a shearing shed and in the yards were dazed sheep. Walking about awkwardly were the freshly shorn, stretching their back legs out to ease the pain of the close crop at the rear end. It was a slow-waking spring and the ewes were shorn before they dropped their lambs. He understood the seasons. He’d grown up running errands and working the dogs and just being useful and also too, when small, he was given the job of bringing in the solitary fawn-coloured milking cow and filling the bucket. This was where he discovered his strong fingers, with his face pressed to the cow’s patient belly and the sweet smell in his hair, and then he’d gone to boarding school, on the luck of a sports scholarship, where the smells were just as ripe but stale and awkward. He pulled the car around, off the road and against the fence, and he sat with his legs out of the passenger door, leaning sideways into the seat and resting his head and sucking in the air and there he fell asleep.

He slept for two hours.

The mist had fallen and glistened on the grass, the sunlight was warm and the cattle were out eating hay in the fields. He drank some water out of a flask and got out of the car, stretching and feeling the sun and listening to the quietness of the cattle, solid as monuments carved from stone and furred with lichen. He climbed through the fence and went over to touch them. Cattle are friendly or they’re not, and here they began to stir and lift their faces. Some trotted off but a number of the older beasts walked over and stood with some nameless expectation. One of them placed the top of her head against his hip. Overhead a collection of ibises made a black ribbon in the sky and then revealed themselves as birds in a heavy formation and in this moment a poem called Wild Geese came to mind, something Rory had shown him. Rory had described it as a prayer of consolation. It was by a woman named Mary Oliver about whom Fin knew nothing but he knew the opening lines of the poem by heart and somehow the rest of it floated in his mind.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — 
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

*

Rebecca was an old girlfriend from school. This meant some clueless thrashing about in the trees, Sunday lunches at the table and holding hands when meeting in town for a walk-around during the school holidays. People knew they were sweethearts and then they weren’t. She’d dropped him in the springtime for a lad at the local school who was built like a hayshed and regarded as being from solid stock. She’d written Fin a letter which he’d read a hundred times in his bed at boarding school. And now that immensity of a boy, Red Wells, was the man Rebecca was marrying. Well, they weren’t fifteen anymore and any hurt feelings were long dead and Rebecca and Fin regarded each other with the mildly erotic fondness easily conjured from uncomplicated times. And Red was always happy to puff himself up on history: he’d stolen the prettiest girl around from the local football hero.

The plan was to get the ceremony out of the way by noon and settle in to serious drinking and picnicking. Fin arrived as everyone was abandoning their morning teas on the lawn (the bride was inside with her mates, Mia among them) to wander through the grass and up to the crest of a hill that looked over the homestead. There they gathered amidst the wildflowers that had come up at the last moment; little girls running around ornamentally in white gauze dresses and a few of the men dressed in vests and braces in bright colours. The quiet competition to be top dog that had been going on since school days continued. Finally the bride arrived on the farm truck. By then, Fin had been elbowed a dozen times by various old mates who chided, “That’d be right. Arriving just in time to upstage the bride.”

Rebecca’s brother Adam had wandered over looking serious. “Heard you’ve had some bad news,” he said.

Fin nodded and readied himself for the words of consolation that can never be answered or even drunk upon with any feeling. “A big night,” he said and was about to talk about Rory when the other man said, “Do you reckon you can put on a bit of a brave face? Sort of a request from Rebecca. It’s her day and all that.”

“I’m here for a good time,” said Fin.

“Much appreciated … A good time was had here last night. Your girlfriend put a few away. What a flirt, eh?”

Adam was a couple of years older than Fin. He’d been a cricketer as a boy and still captained the local team, such as it was. He was taking over the farm from his father and already had hands that were split at the seams and worn like museum pieces. He seemed to view the world at a distance, peering over his cheekbones in the way a sniper peers around a corner. A lot of cattlemen (Fin’s father included, dead early from cancer) had that wry look of amused detachment.

“We kept an eye on her,” said Adam of Mia, suddenly unsure of himself. Fin smiled and looked around and said, “What a great day for a wedding,” and then he put his finger to his lips and pointed because Adam was about to say something else but the celebrant was starting.

“Friends,” she began.

And on it went.

Throughout the ceremony he was thinking how strange an event it was, a wedding. It was like people starring in an advertisement for a holiday they’d never take together. Someone was patting him on the back and someone else whispering in his ear and some other idiot pulled a hair from the back of his head, and all the while he was thinking if he were to marry, what would he hope to get out of it? Most of these fellows were married or engaged or living with someone. Most of the people he knew had “partnered up” and he was always a little shocked at how self-satisfied they were as they drifted into marriage. Fin respected the seriousness of such a commitment but he baulked at how it was worn as a badge or a ranking. If it was the thing to do: what then? Throughout these musings he kept his eyes where they were obliged to be. Mia was one of the bridesmaids, recruited because she was pretty and because that would guarantee the Murdoch papers would include the wedding properly in the social pages that same weekend. Rebecca had asked Mia also because it kept Mia down in the pecking order on this, Rebecca’s most important day.

When Rebecca and Red were declared man and wife, half the crowd surged upon them, kissing them and shaking their hands and making a lot of happy noise. The other half stood back and watched and gave in quickly to talking about other things. A dozen of the men, the boys he’d grown up with, clambered around for a jousting word.

“It’s about bloody time you got your arse back here,” one of the men said.

“What is it? Twelve years?”

“I’ve been back to see Mum. On and off.”

“Speaking of on and off … ” and so began the talk of Mia and where did he find her and down an old, dirty hole they went, seemingly taking Fin with them. And then Charlie Barnes saw the wrongness and said, “Steady on, boys. It’s love.”

Soon after he was pulled into the photographs and Mia was in his ear.

“How are you going?” she said.

“In a bit of a daze,” he said and, because he’d let his guard down, he said, “It was Rory.”

“Aw,” and she really looked clueless, and then desperate, and then worse, perhaps this was unfair but it seemed to Fin that Mia made the face of an old woman pretending to be sad for a three-year-old child because all the cakes were gone. “Try and enjoy yourself. It’s what he would have wanted.”

He wondered if that was true. He thought of Rory talking about poor Achilles slain and cast into the Underworld and moaning unhappily that he’d gladly forsake his status as a champion to toil in the fields if only he might live again.

“Okay?” And she was waving to the women who’d become her new best friends overnight. He then imagined if Mia had died and Rory was standing there, what he’d say: “Don’t show these people anything.” He’d say, “You probably shouldn’t even be here, let’s go.” He’d say, “What do you need?”

Mia stood and waited because she needed everything to be all right and she saw that it might go badly, that dead Rory might invade the party after all.

“Didn’t he grow up around here?” she said.

“Yep,” said Fin. “Half the blokes here pushed his head down the toilet at school.”

“Oh well, they were just boys.”

*

The sit-down lunch and the speeches were held in a generous-sized marquee and afterward there was dancing on the lawn, which was flat and groomed and perfect. When the drinking turned serious, the women went one way and the men collapsed in groups under trees. By then the word has passed around that Rory Wilson had been killed in a car crash.

“Didn’t hear it on the news,” said Lachy Stilwell, who’d showed great political skill as a boy and even now affected a sage-like seriousness that belied a tendency toward sly mendacity and quiet cruelty.

“Probably not the day for it,” said Adam, the bride’s brother.

“I didn’t know you’d kept up with him,” Lachy persisted.

“We shared a place for a while,” said Fin and when Lachy’s nonchalant “That was good of you” caught fire into an obscene wordless cackle, Fin smiled as if he too thought it funny but then he said, “You didn’t know him.”

“Not in that way,” said Charlie Barnes, who then immediately said sorry.

“Bit of a shock, that’s all,” said Lachy.

Fin felt a collective stirring toward concern and consolation, doing the right thing and it made him a little ill for its inadequacy. He heard Rory whispering, “These stunted souls.”

Charlie Barnes said, “A mate’s a mate,” and all around the boys cooed, “That’s right,” and yet they grew gloomy and lost. A hundred ghosts steamed in the afternoon brightness. They cried to be spoken of. The alcohol that might have set alight these tinder-dry feelings had turned into a blanket. Fin had had just the one beer and found all this interesting, the old boarding school mates on the verge of revealing their true hurt selves and yet not. Lachy Stilwell, who’d gone into law, took charge and noted that, “At least it was quick. You must take what mercies a situation offers you.”

“That’s true,” said Fin. “I suppose he saw it that way. A quick escape. I wish I’d known he’d made that decision.”

“What do you mean?” This was Lachy Stilwell, sounding like a six-year-old and then clearing his throat as he saw what it meant.

“He would have said … and really, it’s a shame you didn’t get to know him, a funny bloke,” said Fin. “He’d have said something about Jesus going on his own accord to hang from a tree.”

They laughed and this was a good thing. It was Charlie Barnes who affectionately slapped Fin on the knee while looking out from under the tree to where the women were dancing.